There aren’t many women criminal defence lawyers in Canada who specialize in impaired driving cases, but Kyla Lee of Acumen Law in Vancouver is one of them.
Working in a male-dominated field means she faces criticism that her male colleagues don’t seem to.
“It’s so much easier for people to attack us for defending people facing these offences, because you can call us ‘scum’ who put killers back on the road,” Lee, the past chair of the CBA’s criminal justice section, told the Verdicts and Voices podcast recently.
She jokes that if she had a dollar for every time someone’s called her that or she’s received vitriol for doing her job, she could retire by now.
“My colleague in my business here, he does the exact same thing I do, and comments on his social media are by and large positive, thanking him for protecting the innocent and all of that,” Lee says.
“It’s not the nasty personal attacks that, for whatever reason, I seem to generate. I think I know the big difference between me and him.”
Lee joined fellow criminal defence lawyers Hamna Anwar of Lindsay Law and Anita Szigeti of Anita Szigeti Advocates, both from Toronto, for a panel on the podcast. They talked about obstacles they’ve faced as women in their field and the community they’ve built to overcome them.
Their discussion touched on high-profile sexual assault cases, like the 2016 trial of Jian Ghomeshi and the recent Hockey Canada trial, where female defence lawyers have taken heat over the clients they’re representing. The Hockey Canada trial even elicited a Toronto Star column asking why they defend violent men in court.
